On Tuesday morning, Mark and I did a presentation for K-12 parents on the topic “The Internet, you, your child: why can’t we all just get along?”, where we shared survey data from Mark’s MS classes on Internet usage, responded to questions from the audience and also shared a good video explaining Social Networking. It was a good talk, with lots of interesting questions. A lot of the questions centered around Facebook, which the vast majority of the HS students are using. Many parents were concerned about their students not using the privacy settings in Facebook.
We had invited a senior student to come along as part of our “panel”, which worked very well, as he brought up some interesting points we hadn’t addressed and also added a certain level of credibility to our talk - after all, we may be computer teachers and avid Internet users, but we’re still about twice the age of the students and cannot claim to have first-hand experience of the students’ interests and concerns.
The MS survey data we presented is here:
Note: slides 4 and 5 refer to daily hours of computer use, whereas slides 10 and 11 refer to daily hours of playing games, whether on the computer or on a console (e.g. Playstation, Gameboy, Xbox, Wii…).
Here’s the video on social networking:
